X-Men '97 review: This is how you reboot a beloved TV show

There’s no reason, beyond love, for X-Men ’97 to be any good. Cynicism argues that Marvel could have slapped together almost anything for this unabashed nostalgia product, attached it to the iconic opening title sequence from Fox’s classic Saturday morning cartoon—which ’97 serves as an explicit, and reverential, sequel to—and raked in the same number of clicks and new Disney+ subscriptions as it did by making something genuinely great. The fact that X-Men ’97, which premieres March 20, is great—smart, exciting, funny, and hokey in just the right ways—speaks to an obvious and abundant affection for this brand, and these characters, that’s evident in how the show updates a slightly hoary classic for the modern era.

As the series begins, we open on our mutant heroes (voiced with a mixture of their classic voice actors, plus some new arrivals) adjusting to the job of protecting a world that hates and fears them ever so slightly less than usual, if only for a pretty poignant reason: Professor Charles Xavier has recently been assassinated by human extremists, kicking off a new wave of sympathetic tolerance from the masses. In the wake of Xavier’s death, his left-behind students have achieved a measure of popularity, a position of official status with the United Nations—and a complacency that sees the team threatening to slip a bit, even as the forces of anti-mutant bigotry make it very clear that there’s a difference between “temporary retreat” and “permanent defeat.”

Meanwhile, the familiar character dynamics, still heavily cribbed from the soap-opera engine that powered Chris Claremont’s legendary X-Men run to the top of Marvel’s charts in the 1970s and ’80s, are all intact: the love triangle between perpetually growling Wolverine, death-prone Jean Grey, and classic control freak Cyclops; the touchless love affair between Rogue and rogue-ish Gambit; the way almost any team “conversation” almost immediately devolves into arguments, bickering, and back-biting. The show’s scripts, penned by since-departed showrunner Beau DeMayo, make it clear that, while the X-Men are a family, it’s in the “Nobody can pick on my brother but me” sense, and the knee-jerk contentiousness that fills any major group scene is one of the ways the show pays frequent homage to its source material.

New additions, meanwhile, feel strategic: Shapeshifter Morph, added permanently to the team after being treated like a tragic kickball in the original series, serves mostly to give Wolverine someone to buddy around with (and let the show toss out a bunch of polymorphed cameos during fights), while teen hero Jubilee gets her own newcomer to show the ropes in the form of reluctant mutant Roberto da Costa (Sunspot, to comics fans). And that’s to say nothing of the biggest new addition to the team, heavily hinted at in the show’s promotional materials: The X-Men’s greatest foe, and the primary beneficiary of Xavier’s will, mutant master of magnetism Magneto.

Magneto’s long and troubled history with the team he inherits from his former best friend is a good example of the show’s deft handling of continuity, which assumes X-Men literacy but not fanaticism. You especially don’t need to go into this feeling like you must have chugged through five seasons of the old show; a basic grounding in some of the core stories—which, happily, several of the franchise’s live-action Fox movies also culled from—is all you really require. References to Asteroid M, the Morlocks, and more abound—there’s a Goldballs joke in this thing, which is frankly mind-blowing—but the show doesn’t shrink away from giving enough exposition to make sure you can figure out why someone is firing an optic blast at someone else.

Speaking of those action sequences: They tend to look great, showing inventive uses of the team’s powers, and a lot of clever execution. (An early fight sequence in the middle of a desert is particularly eye-catching, especially once weather goddess Storm arrives, her lightning blasts turning the sands to shining glass.) If the animation is stiff, it’s at least deliberately so, both as an homage to the old show and as a way to capture the occasional look of a classic comic panel. Yeah, it can feel a little cheesy—but authentically so.

That same principle can also be applied to the show’s writing, which is funny and light around the edges—and unapologetically melodramatic at its heart. Which is the sweet spot where the X-Men, Marvel’s most metaphorically flexible superteam, can do the most work: These are big, simple characters, with big, powerful needs, fitting for Saturday-morning fare, but imbued with just enough edge and self-awareness to keep the whole thing from feeling childish. (Also, some of the animation can get genuinely gnarly, especially once psychic powers end up in the fray.) By tackling topics like Magneto’s potential redemption, or Cyclops’ uncertainty about leading the team in the wake of Xavier’s death, DeMayo and his team also manage to work in some more potent material as an undercurrent: An attack by violent protestors on the UN in one episode can’t help but draw parallels to the January 6 Capitol attacks, while one villain’s assertion that “Tolerance is extinction” feels like a direct distillation of the feverish insecurities that power modern-day extremist hate. X-Men ’97 isn’t overly heavy-handed with this material, but it also understands that the idea of an “apolitical” X-Men cartoon is a contradiction in terms.

What we have here, then, is something close to the best of both possible worlds: a nostalgic revival of a beloved series that matches our idea of what it was like to watch X-Men when we were kids, rather than one trying to specifically ape any specific elements of that series. (That is, except for the voice-acting, which, if we’re being honest, doesn’t always work to the modern ear—although the issues are spread out evenly between the returning veterans and some of the newcomers. But god bless George Buza for falling back, apparently seamlessly, into the professorial tones and ten-dollar words of Hank “Beast” McCoy, one of those performances that’s permanently burnt into our childhood.) We came into this series with our eyes peeled for ruby-quartz red flags and came away as true believers instead.

X-Men ’97 premieres March 20 on Disney+